Electronic University presents "Return to the Forest" with Alan Watts.
 During the past few months, I have been studying an extraordinarily interesting paper written
 by Joseph Campbell, whose name will be familiar to many of you as the author of a book on
 mythology called "The Hero with a Thousand Faces."
 Joseph Campbell is also the editor of the posthumous works of Heinrich Zimmer, which
 have been published by the Bollingen Foundation.
 And as a matter of fact, an extraordinary amount of those works is his own original
 writings since they were compiled from Heinrich Zimmer's notes.
 But the particular paper I mention now was presented, I think, in 1957 in August at the
 Aronof Conference in Ascona in Switzerland, a meeting of scholars and philosophers and
 psychologists and scientists which gathers every year under the auspices of a lady who
 has for a long time been interested in the work of C.G. Jung.
 And the particular paper which Joseph Campbell presented at this conference was called "The
 Symbol Without Meaning."
 It isn't published in this country as yet and only appears in the Aronof-Jarlbuch for
 1957, which is published in Switzerland.
 But I expect it will shortly be forthcoming in the excerpts from the papers delivered
 at those conferences, which are published by the Bollingen Foundation.
 Now this particular paper, "The Symbol Without Meaning," is an exploration of an extraordinary
 phenomenon in the history of religions, which you might call the beginning, the development,
 and the dissolution of cosmologies, of great views of the world under religio-philosophical
 auspices, which are the, as it were, languages about the universe devised by various cultures.
 Now he distinguishes two great phases in man's religious history, which he equates with two
 styles of culture which predate our own technological style of culture.
 And these are respectively the hunting cultures and the agrarian cultures.
 He points out that the kind of religion which is characteristic of a hunting culture is
 what now generally goes by the name of shamanism, although this particular word is distinctive
 of Mongolian styles of so-called primitive religion.
 Nevertheless, the phenomenon known as shamanism is found distributed all over the planet.
 Shamanism is characterized by the fact that it's a very individualistic type of religiousness.
 That is to say, the religious experience of the shaman is not something which he gets
 from an authoritative priesthood.
 It's not something handed down from generation to generation for which he goes to a human
 teacher.
 The shaman is a solitary medicine man, man of power, who invariably has to find his experience
 for himself.
 Usually it is by going alone into the dangers of the forests or jungles or holding himself
 up for some days in his own hut and undergoing some kind of ordeal, not necessarily on the
 physical level so much as on the psychic level, going through an adventure in the psychic
 world, the world of spirits.
 And when he comes through the ordeal, he comes out and initiate of power.
 The reason why one must attach so much importance to the individual character of this experience
 is that it goes along with the general style of a hunting culture in which every individual
 man contains the whole culture.
 That is to say, it's not the kind of culture in which specialized functions are needed,
 in which there is a division of labor.
 The hunter spends much of his time on his own and he has to learn to take care of himself
 in the forests without any other human aid.
 And although there are societies and social groups, they are composed of men with their
 women and children, men who are equals because of the type of life that they follow.
 Now an entirely different state of affairs arises when we get a settled agrarian culture.
 Here because the style of life is more complex, a division of labor is required.
 And you begin to get not only a separation of human beings into various castes and various
 functions, but also the necessity of devising far more complex languages and institutions
 to provide communication between them.
 And this always involves a very, very powerful socialization of the individual.
 Spending his time more and more in a settled place and therefore having greater intercourse
 with other people, he has to learn to think in accordance with common patterns, whether
 these patterns be based on language or on the type of work, the geographical features
 of the area which he inhabits, or whatever they may be.
 Each individual has to subordinate himself more and more to a socially implanted view
 of life, because only under these conditions is communication between the individuals possible.
 And so it comes about that the style of religiousness which one associates with an agrarian as distinct
 from a hunting culture is a traditional and authoritative style of religion in which the
 individual derives his experience from a tradition usually embodied in a priesthood.
 And Clamwell goes on to point out that the first historical instances of the appearance
 of the familiar circle symbol which is called in Sanskrit the mandala is associated with
 the agrarian cultures.
 No example of this kind of symbol is found archaeologically prior to the development
 of an agrarian community.
 Now I might say something about the mandala as a world mythological symbol, although anybody
 who has studied the works of C.G. Jung is very familiar with it.
 The mandala is essentially a circle, usually divided into four quarters or multiples of
 four, and has in it, as it were, the general theme of the integration of a community.
 It is not unlike, for example, a stockaded village or city, a wing of defense around
 a center, and Campbell shows that the symbol represents the formation of the kind of society
 we are talking about where the human functions are divided, and we find in many of these
 ancient societies that the functions are precisely divided into four groups, just as in medieval
 European society we had the spiritual power, the priesthood, the temporal power, the nobility,
 the commons and the serfs.
 So in ancient Indian society we had the Brahmana caste, the priesthood, the Kshatriya caste,
 the rulers and soldiers, the Vaishya caste, the commons or merchants, and the Shudra caste,
 the laborers.
 So these four castes represented, as it were, represented by the four divisions of the mandala,
 the common, integrated, encircled community.
 And the important point that he makes about its religiousness is, as I said, that it was
 an experience carried down by tradition, an experience in which a priestly caste was the
 authority and which had to be a common experience just because the whole style of life in a
 community of this kind depended upon communication, and we can communicate with each other by
 virtue not only of sharing a common language but also, more importantly, by sharing a common
 view of the world, a common type of sensuous experience, which is, of course, why those
 who have the type of sensuous experiences which we call hallucinations and illusions
 do not fit easily into a community.
 But every so often, his paper goes on to show, social cosmologies, views of the world held
 in common by societies, tend to break up.
 And actually he starts the paper in the 15th century, going through the expansion of the
 Western world through not only exploration of the surface of the globe but greater knowledge
 of astronomy begins to break up the geocentric view of the Ptolemaic universe, the view of
 the world under which Christianity itself had come to birth.
 And this he looks upon as a breaking up of the mandala, a breaking up of the communal,
 agreed, stable picture of the world by means of which men were able to communicate with
 each other, and a breaking up, therefore, which involves a disruption of all our means
 of communication and a throwing of culture into fundamental confusion.
 It is perhaps, if this be true, just because of the breaking up of the unified world view
 and an entry into the confused world, the relativistic world of modern thought, that
 the Western peoples have become interested in other and former attempts to deal with
 life as it must be lived when the mandala, as it were, breaks up.
 For after all, the idea of going beyond the communal view of the world and somehow managing
 to get along without it is not a new thing.
 It's very interesting that in ancient Indian society, and to some extent even still in
 modern Indian society, that when a man has done his work in society and is able to hand
 over his caste duties, whether they be priestly or political or professional, to his son or
 sons, that, as I think you all know, he, as it were, abandons the world and gives up caste
 and becomes what is ordinarily called a sannyasin.
 We speak of that usually as holy man or hermit or spiritual devotee of some kind.
 But what is of particular interest in this connection is that the abandonment of caste
 is also called entering into the state of vanaprastha.
 Vanaprastha in Sanskrit means a forest dweller.
 And in this sense, the man who gives up caste goes back, as it were, to the style of life
 that predates the agrarian culture.
 He goes, as it were, back to shamanism.
 And this is true not only in Indian culture but also in Chinese.
 Therefore, whereas the Confucian way of life represents the community Deltin-shan, that
 is what the mandala corresponds to, the enclosed, nice little, tight little world in which we
 feel we understand each other and understand our environment, in China, the Taoist philosophy
 is the philosophy corresponding to the Indian search for liberation or moksha, liberation,
 that is to say, from the socially conditioned view of the world.
 And there is evidence to show that the Taoist solitary sage has some sort of ancestral connection
 with the shaman.
 And it is possible that the words shramana in Sanskrit and shaman in Chinese both have
 their origin in the term shaman.
 And the shramana indicates the sannyasin, the man who has given up social life in the
 world and likewise the shaman in Chinese is the lonely sage in quest of immortality who
 has gone by himself into the mountains and the forests.
 Of course we should not suppose that the entry into the stage of vanaprastha or the return
 to the forest by the Taoist sage is in the strict sense of the word a regression.
 It's no more a regression than when we speak of a wise man as one who has become again
 as a child.
 We don't mean that he has literally become childish, that he has forgotten how to think
 and speak and behave in human society and in exactly the same way the person who enters
 in the stage of vanaprastha does not as it were become a wolfman, a sort of wild savage
 who runs around in the jungle naked and wears no clothes and eats his food off the ground
 with his teeth.
 He doesn't do anything of the kind.
 There is some sort of analogy in other words between going back to the shaman's religion,
 going back to the life of the hunter and at the same time going beyond the place where
 we find ourselves in a society where the world view is a conditioned social pattern.
 Now in what sense and in just what way is this going beyond and likewise how does it
 apply to our own situation where we are not as it were going voluntarily beyond a nice,
 clear, authoritative and comfortable view of the world but rather being forced beyond
 it by the very pressure of events, by the uncertainty of our times and by the confusion
 and instability of modern thought which offers us no secure and humanly comfortable picture
 of the universe?
 Well first of all it must be obvious that one of the things that is principally involved
 by a social system of communication is that it is a form of what Korzybski has called
 time binding.
 The whole possibility of thought and language involves a codification of experience.
 It involves a form of thinking about life which is basically after all description.
 Now description is a way of coding, putting into symbols the events that go by us and
 as we begin to be able to put events into symbols we develop most peculiar powers of
 memory.
 It becomes much easier to recollect and to formalize what has happened to us and along
 with this naturally goes the ability to project our recollection into thoughts about the future
 course of events.
 And this apparently is something which primitive, very primitive types of human beings, which
 animals do not do to any great extent.
 But the price that is always paid for this ability to describe and to prefigure what
 is going to happen to us is that it has a very, very alarming effect upon our emotions.
 Because we are able, by being able to think about all sorts of future possibilities, to
 experience the emotions appropriate to those possibilities as if they were present happenings.
 In other words the civilized man tends to be in a state of chronic worry and fear and
 anxiety because he is always confronted not with the simple actuality of what is happening
 before him but with the innumerable possibilities of what might happen.
 And since, because of this, his emotional existence tends to be in a chronic state of
 anxiety and tension, he loses increasingly the ability to relate to the concrete world
 as it manifests itself to him in the actual present in which he lives.
 He becomes so tied up inside that as it were the channels of his sensibility become blocked.
 He gets a kind of neurological sclerosis, a kind of inability to give himself, to be
 spontaneous, to be alive with full joyous abandon.
 Thus the more civilized we become the more stuffy we get.
 And therefore the various ways of liberating oneself from society, of entering what the
 Indians call vanaprastha, the life of forest dweller, going back to the forest, when a
 person reaches a certain point in life when he says, "Now look here, I've had enough
 of all this, I'm simply tired of making life not in the least bit worth living by going
 through the horrors as to what might happen, of going through all this in the name of efficiency
 and membership in the community.
 Let me for a while get away from it all and find out what the score is for myself.
 I'm tired of being told what I ought to believe, I'm tired of being told how I ought to see,
 how I ought to behave, how I ought to feel.
 Let me find out for myself who I really am."
 And so these institutions of going back as it were to the shaman state of religion, of
 getting away from the community interpretation of how one ought to think and feel, arise
 in very many great cultures of the past.
 Now they arise therefore again today and it's perhaps impossible and misleading to try and
 have what I would call authoritative attitude about this phase of man's spiritual exploration.
 Sometimes, for example, when a person wants to find out who he really is, he goes to a
 psychiatrist and occasionally he will find the kind of psychiatrist who does not have
 an authoritative view of what human health is and who simply helps the individual to
 find his own way.
 Other times unfortunately we will find doctrinaire psychotherapists who think they know what
 an integrated healthy and normal human being is and who have a whole theoretic pattern
 of what is believed to be the actual fact, or what are believed to be the actual facts
 of human nature, the actual design of the psyche, and they attempt consciously or subconsciously
 to wangle the patient into accepting this view.
 Alternatively, we may get from the Orient accounts, books about, authorities about their
 ways of liberation, which in many cases, however, have tended to harden into an orthodoxy and
 to present a traditional spiritual experience, just as if they were the kind of spiritual
 experiences which it is the function of that social officer, the priest, to impart.
 And thus, when we get Swamis representing an orthodox interpretation of Indian moksha
 or liberation, or when we get even Zen masters representing perhaps an orthodox Buddhist
 experience or seeming to represent one, we should be suspicious, because these are the
 kind of experiences which cannot be transmitted, which for their very nature are something
 which one finds out for oneself, and which if they could be explained, if they could
 be transmitted, would not be the very thing which they are intended to be, because they
 are discoverers of something authentic, of something genuine, of something which is first
 hand between oneself and one's universe.
 And thus, it's in the nature of things that they can't be codified, they can't be made
 a factor in social communication.
 And so it is that it is in a way fortunate that we here in the Western world do not have
 too many authoritative masters and teachers to whom we feel we can now go for enlightenment.
 More and more of us, I think, tend to feel that we are all alone together whistling in
 the dark, that we haven't a saviour.
 There is no statesman clever enough to understand the frightful tangle of international affairs
 or really to do anything very much about it.
 There is no psychologist or physician or philosopher who really impresses us as having the last
 word on everything.
 More and more each one of us are thrown on our own resources, and this seems to me to
 be a perfectly excellent state of affairs, so that we become in a symbolic sense back
 in the forest, like the hunter of old, who has nobody around him to tell him how he ought
 to feel and how he ought to use his senses, and must therefore make his own exploration
 and find out for himself.
 But you know, when you study the records of these self-discoveries, the fascinating thing
 is that there seems to be such a common measure of agreement between all those who find out
 for themselves.
 And yet always the way in which he has to find out is not through seeking agreement
 with others, not trying to find what others have found, but only to find what his own
 senses and his own direct experience tell him, when he, as it were, goes into his inner
 closet, goes into his own secret place, and asks for a direct encounter with the world,
 and no longer, as it were, looks out of the corner of his eyes to see if everybody else
 is doing the same thing, getting the same results.
 It is in this sense that a person becomes, in the truest sense of the word, a self, an
 original authoritative source of life, as distinct from a person in its original sense,
 a mask, a role that he is playing in a society.
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